


The Smell of Iron

by DemonKing



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, SHEITH - Freeform, Tags May Change, Unrequited Love, adam? who?, allura is very motherly, i thought up the storyline before s5, matt is keith's wingman, the voltron squad is a mess but they try
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-14 03:55:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DemonKing/pseuds/DemonKing
Summary: "And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have."--Leigh Bardugo





	1. Vomiting Flowers

It's not uncommon. It's not uncommon now to see someone coughing up flowers. Sometimes they are roses, sometimes forget-me-not, even hydrangeas from time to time, almost every kind of flower. And all the coughed-up flowers have something in common: blood. 

Deep red blood that smells of iron and stains the flower petals. 

The first registered case of this phenomena was reported in the 1700's and was regarded as witchcraft. Naturally, the woman was burnt at the stake. Written accounts tell of the sickening sweet smell of the flowers that burnt that day. 

Later on the century, more reports of people coughing up flowers were made and more so proclaimed witches were burnt. Some people was able to hide the cough up of flowers long enough to die from it. Flowers obstructing their respiratory system until they couldn't breath. People leaving behind a corpse with blooming lungs. 

It wasn't long until people made the connection. 

A young Japanese man finally made the decisive connection when he read the diary of one the victims (and one of his closest friends). The victim wrote of his unrequited love and the quiet start of his sickness. The sweet and repulsive smell of bloody flowers. The asphyxiating feeling of blooming flowers in your lungs. Death had been a relief. 

The trigger for the mysterious disease was one-sided love. 

The previously nameless disease was baptized then as "花吐き病" (hanahaki), or, "vomiting flowers."

Hanahaki disease reports increased, and it became a global issue. Research was done and towards the end of the 1800's, the "cure" was discovered, but it came with a terrible price. 

Before this medical miracle of a cure was discovered, there was only a way of getting rid of the disease --besides, of course, dying. The flowers disappeared if the reason of your affections returned your love and told you. The possibilities of naturally surviving hanahaki disease are always grim.

But the artificial solution was not much better. The flowers and its roots can now be taken out of the patient's lungs if they are on an early stage, stopping the clogging up of the lungs and preventing premature death. A complete recovery. However, the surgical process comes at a terrible price. By taking out the roots of the flowers, the feelings of love towards the person, stop completely. The thought of completely stopping loving the other person, often stops the patient from taking the surgical solution. Only about a 10% of the affected would take the surgical solution. 

Hanahaki disease affects about a 25% of the young-adult and adult population, with a 30%-35% chance of natural survival. 

The coughing up of bloodied flower petals is not uncommon anymore. 


	2. Blue Pills and Blue Flowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I'm sorry this took so long and isn't even that long.  
> But I have my reasons: I moved like 2 times in the span of about a month and that really fucked me up. Also, I started school again and I don't have as much time as I would like to write. To add that I haven't been receiving as much sleep as I need (8 hours? more like, 4, am I right?). 
> 
> Anyway... enjoy this chapter ❤
> 
> Ps. Keith speaks better than most 5 year-old kids mostly because the author almost never interacts with 5 year-old kids for more than 3 seconds.
> 
> Edit: I published this chapter originally like a week or two before S5 came out. The only change I made was Keith's mom's name.

"Dad?" A small voice. "Daddy, are you alright?" A small voice and dark blue eyes widened in fear. "Dad?!"

"I'm alright, Keith. Daddy is alright." The man tries to smile but his lips are stained with blood, thick, red blood and flower petals. Keith tries to recognize the flower, but his tear filled eyes won't let him. He hates crying. "I'm fine." Another coughing fit seizes the kid's father and he bents over in pain as more red-tainted flowers sprout from his mouth. He cleans his lips with his sleeve; he will have to buy a new one later, and maybe, if possible, some new toys for Keith. 

"I was very scared," the small child whispers as he clings to his father, looking for his warmth and comfort. The small stuffed hippo falls to the floor silently. 

His father puts a hand to his kid's hair and ruffles it affectionately. "I know, little one, I'm sorry." He takes Keith and raises him onto his arms so the kid's head would graze his chest and hear his beating heart. The kid cradles onto his father, closing his eyes, ignoring the tangy smell of blood. "I'm so sorry, little one." 

"Hug me."

"Your manners, Keith," his father answers in mock seriousness and promptly deposits a kiss with his chapped lips on Keith's small forehead. 

"Hug me, please," the small kid pleads with a fearful voice that becomes barely a mumble, "I'm scared, Dad."

"Don't be, little one, all is fine now, all is fine," he reassures his son. As he speaks his apologies, his voice becomes softer, calmer. "You don't need to be scared, Keith, all is fine, Daddy is better now." The kid's tears stains his shirt as the kid cowers his small head on his shoulder. The stain of his kid's tears somehow feel worse than the constant blood stains. Keith's hair tickles his beard slightly, reminding him that he needs to cut Keith's hair this week. 

"Could you... could you play mommy's music box? Please?" 

The box wasn't at any point in time property of Keith's mother, but his dad had figured that it was better for now for the kid to believe that. After all, it was better for the toddler to believe that his mother had left him something substantial but not as dangerous as the knife. He had found the music box at a discount store shortly after Keith was left under his care. The box was half-broken and barely functioning when he had first found it but Keith's dad repaired it for his son. He replaced the rusty springs and gears, coated the outside of the box with wood varnish, and replaced the broken mirror with a new one that covered the whole of the inside of the box's lid, but the one thing that he left just like he had found, was the couple dancing to the music. There was something about the small wooden woman that reminded him of her. Maybe it was the shade of her black hair, or the purple dress, or the haughty look on her face as she dances, that reminded him of her. The couple was left untouched and the box was repaired to make the perfect gift for Keith. He gave Keith the box a Saturday morning, as a keepsake of his mother, and the kid had taken an almost immediate liking to the box and treated it as a sacred relic. A relic from his absent mother. 

Keith's dad nods at the kid's request, and shuffles Keith so his weight would only be on one of his arms as he walks towards the only bed and the old wooden nightstand. He opens one of the drawers and pulls out the precious music box, and as he sits on the bed and his snuggled up child falls onto his lap , the man opens the music box. A hauntingly beautiful song spills from the little box as his father hums along with it, slowly lulling an exhausted and scared Keith to sleep. From time to time he sings parts of an old melody that his own mother used to sing to him when he was about Keith's age, and his hand caresses the kid's hair, combing the long black strands of hair. He looks at his son's long eyelashes and hears the evenness of his breathing and of his heartbeat. The man sighs profoundly and lays his son on the bed. Then, he reaches for the abandoned stuffed animal on the floor and gives it to his son. A fond smile adorns his face as he watches the sleeping child squeeze the soft animal into a tight hug. 

"I'm so sorry, Keith," he apologizes once more even though the child is deep in sleep now. 

The man covers his sleeping son with a colorfully patched blanket and gives him another kiss on his forehead. A kiss that make his chapped lips a smile. He gets up from the bed and walks towards the bathroom, where he takes a quick look at his emaciated face. His face is full of eye bags and rough patches of stubble that he should probably get rid of. He closes his eyes and exhales loudly; he opens the pills cabinet. The orange bottle is a lot emptier than he would like, but he can't afford to have it refilled. To be such a widespread disease, Hanahaki suppressants sure are expensive. He takes two blue colored pills out of the bottle and pays no attention to the dry sound the remaining pills makes in the bottle. He considers briefly to fill a glass of water but decides that it doesn't make a real difference, and he swallows the pills dry. His throat burns faintly at first, just as if he had drunk whiskey straight from the bottle, but relief comes shortly afterwards and his throat won't hurt again for a little while. He is tempted to take another one to alleviate the pain for longer but resists the impulse after shoving the pill bottle back in the cabinet as if it were a cursed object. He can't risk an overdose. Overdoses are especially dangerous when you have a child that is completely dependent on you. He needs to survive, to live a little more, even if it means to bleed his lungs out. He needs to live for his son, for his Keith. 

He slumps on one of the two chairs in the apartment, and sighs, closing his tired eyes. He eyes his sleeping son and quietly begs the universe for more time. And as the kid dreams soundly, the man on the chair chokes on his tears. When he was young, he used to believe that tears made you weak, a coward. Now as he cries, his tears symbolize his resolution to keep fighting, to keep on living.

He never meant to fall in love; he knew the dangers of succumbing to it, but even now, he does not regrets it. It was never his intention to love anyone with the intensity he loves he. And still, it happened. With his eyes still closed and a sad smile on his unshaven face, he recollects how soft her hair was on his fingers and the beauty of her ethereal smile. A smile that always seemed to know more than it would say. Painfully, he remembers how silently and profoundly he fell in love with her. He remembers how heartbroken he felt when she disappeared from his life as if she had never existed. When he realized her disappearance he had felt, and still feels, as if she had ripped his heart out and swallowed it whole, leaving a black hole inside him.

He started showing hanahaki symptoms shortly after. 

Hanahaki always starts small. A small cough, the stench of flowers, the inability of breathing correctly. For him it started as a simple cough, and he disregarded it as such, as nothing that a few lemon cough drops and the resolution of never sleeping without a blanket on again, wouldn't fix. Oh, if only it were that easy.

He did not go to the doctor in the following weeks, going to the doctor would have felt as blowing a common cough out of proportions; besides, he was sure that the love had been mutual, or else he would have developed hanahaki sickness a long time ago. The notion of developing hanahaki when she had loved him seemed ridiculous. She had loved him. That was the only logical conclusion, and he was a man of logic. This was only a simple and quite annoying cough, and nothing more. His conclusion felt true until the day he awoke to coughing up blood and flowers _._ Bright blue flowers that contrasted to the red of his blood. He was sure that the flowers held some kind of special meaning or significance, but he knew next to nothing about flowers and wasn't in the mood for googling it. All he knew about these bloodied flowers was that one day, they would be his executioner. 

 He didn't mind much though, the idea of dying. Death was not something that pained or scared him. Death was a process all beings went through. What pained him was that these cursed flowers were proof that she had never loved him the way he had loved her. 

Before meeting her, he never thought that he would find love, neither did he want to find it. Love to him was a mix of chemicals that faded in time, a death sentence. Something completely unreal. Something he should not waste his time on. An absurd wives' tale. An excuse for evolution to get rid of those "unfit" for survival. 

But all those thoughts became meaningless when he met her, when he had found her. And yet, thinking back to it, he felt their first meeting had been quite cliché, or maybe it was that he didn't exactly knew much about romance in first place, or maybe their whole romance had been misinterpreted by him and she really had never loved him. Maybe he was Romeo making Juliets out of air. 

He opens his eyes and passes his fingers through his hair. He should probably sleep and have some rest. It won't do him any good to be sleep deprived for the third time this week. He gets up from the chair and stretches and his bones pop softly as he does. 

"Good night, Keith. Good night," he says with a barely audible voice as he lays himself on the bed next to his son. The pills he had taken a few minutes ago kick in and he falls on a deep, but restless, sleep. 

His troubled emotions take hold of his dreams as he relives the moment in which Keith came into his life. 

He had become a true disaster after her wordless disappearance from his life and world and sometime at the beginning of his lethal sickness. Bottles of vodka and whisky and beer had formed a carpet of broken and whole glass on the cabin he had been living in. Complete and half burnt photographs of them, of her, adorned the alcohol stained table.

And then, one morning, after months of living as a wreckage, of being the shadow of who he had been, he woke up to the image of a baby inside a topless shoe box on the nightstand by his bed. An image that would have been almost comic to an outsider. And so, he thought at first that the whole situation had been a very bad joke done by a friend, but he reasoned that none of them was that much of an asshole to leave a  _baby, an actual breathing baby_ on his nightstand without a single word. He checked the box for any signs of a note or an explanation and he found nothing, he checked the baby's clothing for a safety pin that would hold the explanation he so badly needed as if it were a Hollywood movie. His only discovery was that the baby was male. But there was no note; there was no desperate, tear-filled sheet of paper to offer him an explanation, a reason. Hollywood had gotten that part all wrong.

There was just a sheathed purple knife taped to the inside wall of the box, a blanket that had lost its colour a long time ago, and a quiet baby that possessed _her_ eyes. 

"Krolia."

Her name on his lips sounded like the breeze on a summer night. And as he observed the fragile-looking baby, he noticed how much the new born looked her: the mouth was his, and the hair was also his, but everything else was hers, especially the stormy blue eyes. 

It was as if the child was a small, slightly inaccurate, copy of her.

With extreme caution, he took the baby out of the box, as if afraid of breaking the baby into pieces if he were to hold him too tight. The baby looked back at him with big, dark eyes full of curiosity for this stranger who was now holding him. He had never considered himself a sentimental man, quite the contrary, but as the baby extended a small hand to hold his thumb, hot tears started falling from his eyes. He brought the baby closer to him and his warmth.

"You... you are my baby... my son... my son and Krolia's," he murmured lovingly, lowering his voice as if he was sharing a secret with the wrapped baby on his hands. For a moment, it seemed that she had loved him enough and on her own way. He accepted that. Still very carefully, he laid the baby on the bed. After a few minutes, the baby had gone back to sleep soundly. It seemed that the baby had inherited his taciturn personality and preferred silence. Small hands grabbed at nothing as the baby fell asleep once again.

"I wonder if he is having bad dreams," he said as he observed the baby's restless sleep, "maybe a little stuffed animal, like the purple hippo I used to have as a kid, would help."

It wasn't until then that he noticed that the baby might be cold. The baby had been wrapped only with an old blanket and the morning was cold. The possibility of the baby catching pneumonia crossed his mind and he quickly wrapped the baby with his own warm blanket. Then, he leaned on the bed next to his sleeping son, to guard his sleep. 

"There you are, safe and warm." He smiled to himself. "I wonder if she gave you a name. Maybe not, she was never the best to remember to do stuff," he chuckled to himself. "How should I name you? What do you think of Gerald?" There was no answer from the sleeping infant. "What about Akira? I think she once mentioned that she liked that name." A pause. "No? Well, maybe that will be your middle name." He looked around and saw an old, dusty framed photograph from his college years. His younger brother had been on the picture. His younger brother on a lock as he ruffled his hair. They had been close until his death a few years ago on that car accident. "What do you think of Keith?" 

A smile. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think that Keith's dad was a good dad, and I love the idea of Keith having a stuffed hippo as a kid and that being the reason of why he loves them.
> 
> My love Shiro will appear next chapter, so do not worry.
> 
> Again, I'm so sorry it took me so long to write it.
> 
> Anyhow, thanks for reading ❤

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first multi-chapter work and is unbetaed so if there are any mistakes, please let me know. Also, for the purposes of this fanfic, I have modified a little the hanahaki disease, just a little bit though. I hope to upload at least once a month but it could be more or less depending on the circumstances. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
